This blog has become a sort of personal-cum-public diary. As for its contents, some are meant for me and my friends and relatives; others are for the public. This blog will have only positive, ennobling, elevating, encouraging and uplifting thoughts/ideas/materials. Whoever visits should feel happy and should be able to pick up some good ideas/thoughts/links. In short, "NOTHING NEGATIVE" is my motto.(Grateful thanks to Jon Sullivan and Public-Domain-Photos.com for the background photo)

Happy New Year 2015

WISH YOU ALL A HAPPY, HEALTHY,
PROSPEROUS AND PURPOSEFUL
NEW YEAR 2015

"..... Impatience, impatience, impolite behaviour seems to be the order of the day. "Might is right" is followed on the roads and other public places. Though our brains have progressed, our "hearts" have not. The need of the hour is periodic refresher courses in moral science!" - From a letter from N.R.Archana (by e-mail) to the Editor, The Hindu, Madurai, April 1, 2007.

97% of all the water on earth is salty. Only 3% is fresh water. Of that 3%, over 2% is frozen in ice sheets and glaciers. And that means that less than 1% of that 3% fresh water is found in lakes, rivers and underground.

Saturday, November 03, 2007

Science is getting a grip on people's fears. Scientists say they now know better what is going on inside our brains when a spook jumps out and scares us. Knowing how fear rules the brain should lead to treatments for a major medical problem: when irrational fears go haywire.

Millions of people suffer from anxiety disorders, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. A Harvard Medical School study estimated the annual cost to the U.S.economy in 1999 at roughly $ 42 billion.

Fear is a basic primal emotion that is key to the evolutionary survival. It is something that human beings share with animals. Genetics plays a big role in the development of overwhelming - and needless - fear, psychologists say. But so do traumatic events.

Scientists figure they can improve the fear-dampening process by learning how fear runs through the brain and body.

The fear hot-spot is the amygdala, an almond-shaped part of the deep brain. The amygdala, an almond-shaped part of the deep brain. The amygdala is not responsible for all of people's fear response, but it is like the burglar alarm that connects to everything else, said Elizabeth Phelps, Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University - AP

With grateful thanks to: AP and The Hindu (Madurai edn, November 1, 2007)

The world's smallest hard drives have already shrunk to the size of a postage stamp, but nanoscale computing may soon make that achievement look elephantine, say some of the stars of information technology.

Breathtaking change is on the horizon in personal and industrial data storage, the experts say in a review of the vanguard technology, being published in the journal, NATURE MATERIALS.

The latest developments in "spintronix", for example, are poised to go beyond the electrical charge of classic electronics to harness the quantum "spin" state of electrons, writes Albert Fert, co-winner last month of the Nobel Prize for Physics. That could usher in dramatic advances in hard disk storage capacity and retrieval, says Professor Fert.

Along with Peter Gruenberg of Germany, Frenchman Professor Fert was lauded for discovering the principle called giant magnetoresistance(GMR), that lies at the heart of the past decade's most popular electronic devices, from iPods to cell phones to Blackberries.

"MRAM potentially combines key advantages such as non-volatility, infinite endurance and fast random access - down to five nanoseconds read/write time - that make it a likely candidate for becoming the 'universal memory' of nanoelectronics," forecast Professor Fert and his colleagues.

Experimental engineers at IBM, which was the first company to commercialise GMR devices, are already hard at work on this new generation disk-drives, which promise to boost data storage by a factor of a hundred.

The race for space is driven by consumer hunger for data-rich formats such as on-demand television and high-definition video.

But keeping pace with demand depends on a constant stream of technological breakthroughs, and until recently it seemed that certain chokepoints - such as the size of transistors - were finally going to disprove Moore's Law.

More than forty years ago, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore said the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double roughly every 24 years, a prediction that has largely held true ever since.

"We literally got to the stage where we could not make it any smaller," Intel's chief technology officer Justin Rattner said in an interview with Nature.

The transistor, which is used as an amplifier or as an electrically controlled switch, is the fundamental building block of the circuitry in computers and most consumer electronic devices.

But an innovation in materials - a nanoscale changeover from silicon to metals inside transistor "gate" - has given rise to "the dawn of a new era," Rattner said.

Nature's review of state-of-the-art storage technology includes a survey of advances in the materials used for making rewritable optical disks, giving rise to the development of high-definition DVDs and Blu-ray.

Blu

-ray is an optical disk format jointly developed by many of the world's leading consumer electronics and media manufacturers including Apple, Dell, Hitachi and a dozen others.

The format enables recording and rewriting and playback of high-definition video, as well as five times the storage capacity of traditional DVDs.

Finally, Charles Lieber and Wei Lu of Harvard University discuss the so-called "bottom up" assembly of nanotubes and nanowires in electronic circuits that could one day possibly replace silicon technology in nanoelectronics - AFP

American astronomers have discovered the biggest black hole orbiting a star 1.8 million light years from earth in the constellation Cassiopeia. It has a record-setting mass 24 to 33 times that of the sun.

Stellar-mass black holes have such powerful gravity fields that not even light can escape them. Astronomers estimate their mass by measuring their gas emissions and the gravitational effect on the stars they orbit.

My body has been used to walking since childhood. Walking has been a source of knowledge, creativity, energy and delight to me. When you walk in the open, under the boundless expanse of the sky, your heart too becomes naturally large and expansive - AcharyaVinobaBhave

Abhishek D.Shah does some quick math and says we have lost 9,512 years to unpunctuality!

"The two-minute noodle takes 10 minutes. The instant coffee takes too many instants and the 30-minute pizza hardly ever arrives before the 60th minute. And apparently time is money. I can only wonder what our economy would be like if we learnt the art of being on time.

Being in the media, 'deadline' is a word I encounter on a daily basis. "The deadline is on the 20th but you can give it to me by the 22nd," a friend from a publication tells me. I wonder if the guys compiling the dictionary should reconsider the meaning of the word.

I was invited to a friend's wedding recently. The invitation requested my gracious presence at 7.30 p.m. Not wanting to scar others, I decided to go in for a hair cut and promptly reached the salon by 6.30 p.m. The stylist was efficient and I was done and ready by 7 p.m. As I left the salon, I noticed someone I knew getting an elaborate facial done. Guess who? The bride. Her presence at the reception hall was not be felt until 9 p.m.

It is inspiring to note that in the airline industry, an "on-time" performance means being lat by a maximum of one hour. It is simply amazing how we manage to be late with such consistency. It is an art form we have mastered and are transferring to future generations.

Being five minutes late is not a crime but, consider this. We are a billion Indians. If each of us is late by just 5 minutes, we are late as a country by 5 billion minutes. I will spare the math but that is roughly 9,512 years. Just imagine all that we could do in so much time!"

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About Me

This is what people close say about me: “Misfit, Dreamer, Impractical, Champion of lost causes, Always Wrong” etc. etc. Maybe they are right, maybe not. What do I think of myself? I am trying to find out.